CAIRO - Despite protests calling for banning the controversial Abu Hassira annual festival, thousands of Jews from all over the world are flocking into the tiny Nile Delta village of Damityoo, el-Behira Governorate, to celebrate the birthday of the Moroccan-born rabbi Yacov Abu Hassira. "It is a shame that the Israelis will be allowed to enter Egypt to celebrate this festival, while they have sealed off the Gaza Strip and deprived our Palestinian brethern of the basic needs of life," Ahmed Sharabi, a resident of the village, has said. Sharabi, a school teacher, added that the Governor of Behira and the police should close all the roads leading to Damityoo, where the week-long festival, which is held in late December, is held. Each year, Damityoo residents complain of heavy police presence in their small village, where the Abu Hassira shrine is located. Although Sharabi insists that he has nothing against the Jews, he said that they should feel ashamed of themselves to visit Egypt while Israel is “oppressing the Palestinians”. He added that thousands of Damityoo residents had sent an urgent appeal to the Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif demanding him to cancel the festival, which they dismissed as an unbearable annual headache to them. The residents complain that the revellers drink alcohol, which is forbidden in Islam, and engage in obscene dancing to be blessed as part of their veneration of the rabbi. They also grouse that the police order them to close down their shops and services for the festival. "The celebrants are engaged in rituals that endanger public morals and hurt the feelings of Egyptians," Sharabi said. Yacov Abu Hatsira, a rabbi from southern Morocco who wrote Talmudic commentary, was the head of the Jewish community in Damanhur before he died in 1881. He has since been revered for miracles attributed to him. His real name was El-Baz, but he took on the name of Abu Hatsira (Father of the Straw Mat) when, having been denied access to a Palestine-bound ship by its captain, he was said to have reached the Promised Land on a carpet floating over the water. The villagers dismiss the story as a myth. They also questioned the validity of the festival, saying that the Jews had never held the Abu Hassira festival before they left the country after Israel state was founded in 1948. Meanwhile, Sharabi demanded a swift intervention by the Government to enforce a 2001 court ruling that bans the holding of the Abu Hassira festival. "About 400 Jews have arrived since Sunday to take advantage of a longer stay in the village, and there will be about 6,000 for the big day. The gathering reaches its climax with an auction of the golden key to Abu Hassira's shrine. The key is sold for millions of dollars" he said. They arrived amid heavy security with the police seeking to prevent any sort of violence against them, Sharabi said, adding that the authorities had set up barricades filtering visitors entering the area around the Abu Hassira shrine, believed to be 200 years old. He said more visitors were due from Israel, Europe, the US and Latin America to pay homage to Abu Hassira. The village residents, who have officially requested that the festival should be stopped because of their discontent about the visitors' misconduct, have demanded the Government should move Abu Hassira's remains to Israel and change the name of their village from Damityoo to Mohammed el-Dura, the Palestinian young boy whom “Israeli forces shot dead in cold blood during the second Intifada. Both requests have been rejected by the Government without reason,” Sharabi said. He claimed that some opponents of the festival had been branded by the Mossad, Israel's secret service, as anti-Semitic and enemy of the Jewish state. Sharabi said that Jews of Egyptian stock and Israeli businessmen, represented by officials from the Tel Aviv Embassy in Cairo, had been trying in vain to buy the plots of land surrounding the shrine. They have offered LE5 million per feddan (acre) adjacent to the shrine, but the owners refused these cheap offers, he said. "In the early 1980s, only a small number of Jews came to Damityoo, but they soon began coming in the hundreds," Sharabi said, adding that the frevellers usually included major rabbinic figures and high-level Israeli government officials. He pointed out that the size of the shrine housing Abu Hassira's tomb has been significantly enlarged over the last three decades. "Originally, the shrine, whose interior walls have been decorated with Hebrew phrases, only occupied some 350 square metres. But over the last 30 years, it has been slowly enlarged. Now, it occupies more than 8,000 square metres of land," Salama Hamed, another local resident, said. "It is lamentable that holding the Abu Hassira festival is more important to the Government than holding Sayyeda Zeinab, or el-Hussein annual Moulids, which were cancelled last year on the pretext that it was afraid of the spreading of swine flu among the celebrants," he added.
